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sam henri gold

There’s this Google product, NotebookLM, where you dump text files into it and you can ask questions to it. they just rolled out a feature to generate a “podcast” based on the source material.

I piped out 100,000 characters of /dev/urandom, encoded it as binary in a text file, titled them all “patent.txt” and gave it to a notebook.

It just goes off the rails and they hallucinate a conspiratorial yap sesh for 10 minutes.

15 comments
sam henri gold

to be clear, none of the files are any different in terms of length.

Jon Anderson

@samhenrigold i'm losing my mind listening to this. i hate it? "Why bother encoding all of these patents in binary code?" "that's the million dollar question isn't it." "Where do we even go from here?"

sam henri gold

@anderson_jon I pulled up an old notebook I made in school about visual design and branding in the 2008 presidential election (just a bunch of academic papers and articles and a thesis and a chunk of a book) to try it how it’s supposed to be used.

it's honestly not that much more compelling. Still like 40% yap, 60% surface level observations.

Jon Anderson

@samhenrigold I won't lie, this is how yapping podcasts sound to me anyways and is why I can't listen to 99% of them :D scripted or get out.

Very funny that this "incredible tech advancement" is just...somehow worse than a middle schooler reading of it all. "It wasn't just a pretty picture, it was a feeling." "It was a promise." "Like... those <seductive voice> posters."

sam henri gold

@anderson_jon one of the first things i noticed about that recording lmao

Григорий Клюшников

"Binary 101" lol

I skipped to the end hoping it would devolve into something that isn't English words that make sense like you can sometimes get ChatGPT to do if you talk to it long enough.

sam henri gold

@grishka It’s close to gibberish but there are probably enough LLMs chained back to back to filter out pure garbage. So we’re left with this garbage instead. Here’s what it did with `yes "hi" | head -n 100000 > hi.txt`

makeworld

@samhenrigold @grishka this is making me go insane. They did bullshit generator but with bullshit aesthetics this time too

Adam Curry :pci: :pc2blue:

@samhenrigold
After one minute I'm already heating the non-dominant speaker adding "yeah", "that's right", "okay" etc to make it sound like a conversation. Ugh.

Kaito

@samhenrigold the last thing I needed in college was better grades, but I can't help but feel this technology would have helped me be…even better-er

JJ :he_him:

@samhenrigold worst RadioLab I've heard in a long time!

Thomas 🔭🕹️

@samhenrigold they’ve invented a way to make even worse podcasts than we already have, probably using up 10,000 gallons of water per minute generating it

I hate it here

nigel
What an insane waste of resources. Have they found an actual good use for these things yet? Or is it another solution looking for a problem.
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